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Dealing With Domain Names, URLs, Parameters & All That Jazz – Subdomains or subdirectories? Are tracking parameters a problem for search engines? Keywords in the URL make a difference? How about the "level" of a page — is "deep" in a site bad? This session focuses on technical SEO questions of this nature and provides answers. Programmed by Jane & Robot.

Keri Morgret: Correlation IS NOT Causation. Gives example of more ice cream vendors when NY is hotter, but doesn't mean that it's the ice cream vendors are causing the heat. Keep this in mind when you're looking at the data Rand is presenting.

[Comment From Whitespark]If you have a URL on your site with a few good external links, but it doesn't have keywords, would it be worth it to change the filename to have keywords and then 301 redirect it? Or, don't bother, given the low value of keywords in the filename?

Keri Morgret: Be consistent with your links and make sure you're pointing to the same URL each time.

11:16

Keri Morgret: Another reason for canonicalization is it really helps in your analytics.

11:21

Keri Morgret: The site we're looking at also has several different domains as landing pages. Each domain is looking at a separate part of furniture, such as dining room, bedroom, etc. Vanessa is pointing out that by only showing the dining room stuff to a user, you're missing out on the user knowing about your bedroom furniture.

11:25

Keri Morgret: An audience member bought from this site, notes that she didn't realize that he had all of these different sites. She said it affected the brand credibility as she was wondering why they had all of these different sites.

11:26

Keri Morgret: Talking about how people find sites. People use several searches to find a site, people don't remember what they searched for, don't always know what you're looking for at first.

11:29

Keri Morgret: Tood Friesen points out that it's good to have paid search and organic search pointing to the same site / same company name. 87% will click on organic if it appears in both page. If both appear, user gets more of an authoritative sense that it's credible.

11:31

Keri Morgret: AOL thinks about if people are different types of users for using subdomains vs subfolders, but they do this for user experience rather thank rankings.

11:34

Keri Morgret: Another factor in subdomains vs subfolders is how much technical support you have to do this. Subdomains involve multiple robots.txt, integrating analytics, etc.

11:36

Keri Morgret: People watching via coveritlive: it doesn't appear that the speakers are going to go to the URL where people asked questions. There are two more technical sessions today where you may be able to get some questions answered.

11:37

Keri Morgret: One takeaway from this whole discussion is that there are a lot more factors than just rankings when you decide whether to do a subdomain or subdirectory. Technical, analytics, user experience, etc.

11:39

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11:43

Keri Morgret: Looking at a dive store that is local, but sells nationwide. Advice given to website owner is to make sure that people know they sell nationwide. Also that the online store should still be in the subdirectory.

11:43

Keri Morgret: If you have a local site, be sure to register it in Google and Yahoo as a local business.

11:44

Keri Morgret: If you have a thin site, subdomains won't usually also show.

11:46

Keri Morgret: Large news site is talking about their subdomain hell. People in different areas of company have different views on how things should be done.

11:48

Keri Morgret: I've heard similar challenges in other sessions.

11:48

Keri Morgret: Where to put things? Healthcare is now a political issue. Put in health or politics?

11:48

Keri Morgret: Rand: not worried as much about Google, but worried about users here as where users would expect to find things.